Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, November 09, 2007

My Mistaken Focus

Edited and Upgraded from Comments.

I have been castigated by some people who actually sympathize with much of my critique of Superlativity (but, you know, in moderation), for focusing so much of my attention lately on "naïve techno-utopian" ideas rather than "bioconservative" ideas that seem to these people far more urgent and dangerous at the moment.

Right off the bat, I want to say that I think it risks a rather trivializing misconstrual of my critique of Superlative Technology Discourses to treat it as directed merely at "naïve techno-utopians" as if to say prevailing neoliberal Development discourse is a matter of few nice suburban kids playing a harmless prank, most of whom are likely to outgrow their facile notions in the fullness of time. But more on all that in a moment.

"Bioconservative," for newcomers to Amor Mundi, is a bit of a catch-all term (useful in general but less useful the more specific your focus, like most terms of this kind), which I define in my Technoprogressivisms essay as characterizing people who are "hesitant and conspicuously skeptical about technological development in general and [who] tend to take up strong positions of opposition to (especially emerging or unfamiliar) practices of genetic, prosthetic or cognitive modification of human beings in particular. Whether arising from what is conventionally construed as a right-leaning politics of religious/cultural conservatism or from what is conventionally construed as a left-leaning politics of Deep Ecology, bioconservative positions tend to oppose medical and other technological interventions into what are broadly perceived as current human and cultural limits, usually in the name of a defense of 'the natural' deployed as a moral category." (The definition of bioconservatism in Wikipedia seems to have been adapted from mine, at least for now.) What matters to me in this formulation is the way it calls attention to the operation in which the use of the term "natural" enables one to treat something customary as instead something inevitable, and then the subsequent freighting of this operation with intense moral significance (usually inspiring a movement politics in the service of its "defense").

What I want to say first about all this is that I simply disagree with those who would claim that bioconservative discourses are more influential than facile technophilic/technocratic discourse. Obviously I agree that bioconservative formulations have influence and a pernicious impact (it's awfully hard to fail to notice this if you are a queer person like me, as I explain here and here, for example), and of course I do regularly critique them right here on Amor Mundi for just this reason (as, for example, here and here and here and here and here and here and here).

But naive technophilia and technodevelopmental elitism constitute the default assumptions of global corporate-militarist "development" discourse, here and now, in my view and are, hence, far more influential and pernicious as far as I can see. To the extent that one's politics are shaped by an awareness of the catastrophic impact of extractive petrochemical industry on climate, waste, toxicity, disease, soil erosion, deforestation, species loss, and so on, all endlessly cheered on by a chorus of "naïve techno-utopian" media boosters and corporate press releases -- many of them schizophrenically flogging greenwashing vacuities out of the other sides of their faces all the while -- it is especially hard to come away with a different impression than this.

Superlativity as I have been trying to critique it is a symptom and especially clear expression of this default neoliberal (corporatist) and neoconservative (militarist) technodevelopmental discourse, making it a fine lens through which to puncture the dangerous pretensions of the prevailing discourse.

As far as I'm concerned, however awful bioconservatisms can be (and I would never want to seem to dismiss the disastrous domestic and international impact of bioconservative arguments and politics on reproductive health policy or on funding for genetic medical research, for example) they remain more or less one ugly flailing tentacle of Movement Conservatism in the crisis and culmination moment of the neoliberal/neoconservative Washington Consensus.

Incredibly, however, it actually seems to me that what little general public traction bioconservative discourse actually gets (since the fact is that almost everybody actually champions healthcare in the service of longer healthier lives, and since most people who live in secular multicultures actually prefer them to police states) derives from its appeal to people's very sensible anti-corporatist and anti-militarist attitudes. Bioconservatives commandeer what should be a technoprogressive critique in the service of their own actually socioculturally reactionary aspirations. Since my own critique of Superlative Technology Discourses foregrounds this very connection of so much prevailing "pro-technology discourse" with elitism, reductionism, indifference, and exploitation it seems to me it actually functions to deprive bioconservative rhetoric of its one current advantage as a technocentric analytic framework.

Superlative technocentrics themselves typically respond to bioconservative formulations instead by misframing all of this as what amounts to a battle between Science and Religion, in which they cast themselves in the role of the Champions of (a reductively and monolithically misconstrued) Science and all of their foes as champions of a fundamentalist or New Age religiosity (misconstrued as a matter of epistemology when fundamentalism is more usually and more crucially a matter of politics) -- all of which has the misfortune of being both mostly wrong and also completely stupid.

What makes it ugly as well on top of that is that this whole facile religion/science framing of contemporary technodevelopmental politics is really playing out as an essentially sectarian squabble between competing fundamentalisms (politicized faiths), one of them simply Patriarchy under the guise of an elitist organization of some Judeochrislamic variation or other and the other simply Industrial Capitalism in the guise of a elitist organization of a "scientism" billing itself as "Science."

And so, not to put too fine a point on it, it is my own considered opinion that the focus of my critique is exactly where it should be and in fact urgently needs to be. It seems to me to be yet one more of the manifold derangements produced by an identity politics model of technodevelopmental social struggle (what I term Sub(cult)ural Superlativity) that so-called Transhumanist- and Singularitarian-identified folks actually seem to think it is somehow incisive and useful to pretend they are a Good ("Pro-Technology") Army locked in a kind of duel to the death with an Evil ("Anti-Technology") Army consisting of "Deathists" and "Luddites." None of that nonsense has anything more than the most superficial connection to lived reality, and the actual urgency of some of the quandaries of actually existing ongoing, emerging, and proximately upcoming technoscientific change is ridiculously ill-served by these cartoonish and self-congratulatory mis-mappings of the terrain.

1 comment:

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> Superlative technocentrics themselves typically respond to
> bioconservative formulations. . . by misframing [the conflict]
> as what amounts to a battle between Science and Religion,
> in which they cast themselves in the role of the Champions of
> (a reductively and monolithically misconstrued) Science and
> all of their foes as champions of a fundamentalist or New Age
> religiosity (misconstrued as a matter of epistemology when
> fundamentalism is more usually and more crucially a matter of
> politics) -- all of which has the misfortune of being both
> mostly wrong and also completely stupid.
>
> What makes it ugly as well on top of that is that this whole facile
> religion/science framing of contemporary technodevelopmental
> politics is really playing out as an essentially sectarian squabble
> between competing fundamentalisms (politicized faiths). . .
>
> [S]o-called Transhumanist- and Singularitarian-identified
> folks actually seem to think it is somehow incisive and useful to
> pretend they are a Good ("Pro-Technology") Army locked in a kind
> of duel to the death with an Evil ("Anti-Technology") Army consisting
> of "Deathists" and "Luddites." None of that nonsense has anything more
> than the most superficial connection to lived reality. . . [which]
> is ridiculously ill-served by these cartoonish and self-congratulatory
> mis-mappings of the terrain.

"Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past
ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without
question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They
thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be,
but in fact they were all the time secretly united -- united
**with** each other and **against** earlier and later ages -- by a
great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the
characteristic blindness of the twentieth century -- the blindness
about which posterity will ask, 'But how **could** they have
thought that?' -- lies where we have never suspected it, and
concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between
Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr H. G. Wells and
Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness. . .

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries
blowing through our minds, and this can be done only be reading
old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the
past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made
as many mistakes as we. But not the **same** mistakes. They
will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and
their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger
us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible,
but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a
corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot
get at them."

-- C. S. Lewis, "On The Reading Of Old Books"



"One holds, or thinks one holds, a particular view. . . And you can
go on for years discussing and defending it to others **of your own
sort**. New refinements can be introduced to meet its critics;
brilliant metaphors can seem to illuminate its obscurities;
comparisons with other views, 'placings' of it, are somehow felt
to establish its position in a sort of aristocracy of ideas.
For the others are all talking the same language and all move in
the same world of discourse. All seems well. Then turn and try
to explain this same view to an intelligent mechanic or a sincerely
inquisitive, but superficially quite irreverent, schoolboy.
Some question of shattering crudity (it would never be asked in
learned circles) will be shot at you. You are like a skilled
swordsman transfixed by an opponent who wins just because he
knows none of the first principles. The crude question turns out
to be fatal. You have never, it now appears, really understood
what you have so long maintained. You haven't really thought it
out; not to the end; not to 'the absolute ruddy end.'

You must either give it up, or else begin it all over again. If,
given patience and ordinary skill, you cannot explain a thing
to any sensible person whatever (provided he will listen), then
you don't really understand it yourself. . .

What we need to be particularly on our guard against are precisely
the vogue-words, the incantatory words, of our own circle. For
your generation they are, perhaps, **engagement**, **commitment**,
**over against**, **under judgment**, **existential**, **crisis**,
and **confrontation**. These are, of all expressions, the least
likely to be intelligible to anyone divided from you by a school of
thought, by a decade, by a social class. They are like a family
language, or a school slang. And our private language may delude
ourselves as well as mystifying outsiders. Enchanted words
seem so full of meaning, so illuminating. But we may be deceived.
What we can derive from them may sometimes be not so much a clear
conception as a heart-warming sense of being at home and among
our own sort. 'We understand one another' often means 'We are in
sympathy.' Sympathy is a good thing. It may even be in some ways
a better thing than intellectual understanding. But not the
same thing."

-- C. S. Lewis, "Before We Can Communicate"